Foundations of B2B electronic contracting

Nowadays, flexible electronic cooperation paradigms are required for core business processes to meet the speed and flexibility requirements dictated by fast-changing markets. These paradigms should include the functionality to establish the formal business relationship required by the importance of these core processes. The business relationship should be established in an automated, electronic way in order to match the speed and flexibility requirements mentioned above. As such, it should considerably improve on the ineffectiveness and inefficiency of traditional contracting in this context. The result of the establishment should be a detailed electronic contract that contains a complete specification of the intended cooperation between organizations. Electronic contracts should contain a precise and unambiguous specification of the collaboration at both the conceptual and technological level. Existing commercial software solutions for business-to-business contracting provide low level of automation and concentrate solely on the automated management of the contract enactment. However, in the modern, dynamic, business settings, an econtracting system has to support high automation of the e-contract establishment, enactment, and management. In the thesis, the business, legal, and technological requirements for the development of a highly automated e-contracting system are investigated. Models that satisfy these requirements and that can be used as a foundation for the implementation of an electronic contracting system are defined. First, the thesis presents the business benefits introduced to companies by highly automated electronic contracting. Next, a data and process analysis of electronic contracting is presented. The specification of electronic contracts and the required process support for electronic contract establishment and enactment are investigated. The business benefits and data and process models defined in the thesis are validated on the basis of two business cases from on-line advertising, namely the cases of online advertising in "De Telegraaf" and "Google". Finally, the thesis presents a specification of the functionalities that must be provided by an e-contracting system. A conceptual reference architecture that can be used as a starting point in the design and implementation of an electronic contracting system is defined. The work in the thesis is conducted on the intersection of the scientific areas of conceptual information and process modeling and specification on the one hand and distributed information system architecture modeling on the other hand

The development of European mobile telecommunications standards : an assessment of the success of GSM, TETRA, ERMES and UMTS

Nowadays, flexible electronic cooperation paradigms are required for core business processes to meet the speed and flexibility requirements dictated by fast-changing markets. These paradigms should include the functionality to establish the formal business relationship required by the importance of these core processes. The business relationship should be established in an automated, electronic way in order to match the speed and flexibility requirements mentioned above. As such, it should considerably improve on the ineffectiveness and inefficiency of traditional contracting in this context. The result of the establishment should be a detailed electronic contract that contains a complete specification of the intended cooperation between organizations. Electronic contracts should contain a precise and unambiguous specification of the collaboration at both the conceptual and technological level. Existing commercial software solutions for business-to-business contracting provide low level of automation and concentrate solely on the automated management of the contract enactment. However, in the modern, dynamic, business settings, an econtracting system has to support high automation of the e-contract establishment, enactment, and management. In the thesis, the business, legal, and technological requirements for the development of a highly automated e-contracting system are investigated. Models that satisfy these requirements and that can be used as a foundation for the implementation of an electronic contracting system are defined. First, the thesis presents the business benefits introduced to companies by highly automated electronic contracting. Next, a data and process analysis of electronic contracting is presented. The specification of electronic contracts and the required process support for electronic contract establishment and enactment are investigated. The business benefits and data and process models defined in the thesis are validated on the basis of two business cases from on-line advertising, namely the cases of online advertising in "De Telegraaf" and "Google". Finally, the thesis presents a specification of the functionalities that must be provided by an e-contracting system. A conceptual reference architecture that can be used as a starting point in the design and implementation of an electronic contracting system is defined. The work in the thesis is conducted on the intersection of the scientific areas of conceptual information and process modeling and specification on the one hand and distributed information system architecture modeling on the other hand

Commentary

Enforceable promises discourage lying, cheating, and stealing. Contracts that embody such promises shape institutions, distribute power, and organize markets. The Smith-King critique of elite empirical contracts scholarship reveals a field preoccupied with the first set of functions and barely interested in the second. I am loath to second-guess this view without empirical evidence of my own. Instead, I draw from it two sets of implications-one for the substantive study of contracts, the other for the relationship between contract theory and contract empiricism

FastVentricle: Cardiac Segmentation with ENet

Cardiac Magnetic Resonance (CMR) imaging is commonly used to assess cardiac structure and function. One disadvantage of CMR is that post-processing of exams is tedious. Without automation, precise assessment of cardiac function via CMR typically requires an annotator to spend tens of minutes per case manually contouring ventricular structures. Automatic contouring can lower the required time per patient by generating contour suggestions that can be lightly modified by the annotator. Fully convolutional networks (FCNs), a variant of convolutional neural networks, have been used to rapidly advance the state-of-the-art in automated segmentation, which makes FCNs a natural choice for ventricular segmentation. However, FCNs are limited by their computational cost, which increases the monetary cost and degrades the user experience of production systems. To combat this shortcoming, we have developed the FastVentricle architecture, an FCN architecture for ventricular segmentation based on the recently developed ENet architecture. FastVentricle is 4x faster and runs with 6x less memory than the previous state-of-the-art ventricular segmentation architecture while still maintaining excellent clinical accuracy.Comment: 11 pages, 6 figures, Accepted to Functional Imaging and Modeling of the Heart (FIMH) 201

A Conceptual Framework for B2B Electronic Contracting

Electronic contracting aims at improving existing business relationship paradigms and at enabling new forms of contractual relationships. To successfully realize these objectives, an integral understanding of the contracting field must be established. In this paper, we propose a conceptual framework for business-to-business contracting support. The framework provides a complete view over the contracting field. It allows positioning research efforts in the domain, analysing them, placing their goals into perspective, and overseeing future research topics and issues. It is the basis for drawing conclusions about basic requirements to contracting systems

The Importance of Being Standard

Contract standardisation in the sovereign debt market saves time and money in preparing documents and endows widely-used terms with a shared public meaning, which in turn saves investors the costs of acquiring information, facilitates secondary market trading and reduces the scope for mistakes in the judicial interpretation of contract terms. Sovereign debt issuers and investors claim to value standardisation and list it as an important contractual objective. Issuers generally insist that their bond contracts are standard and reflect market practice. Variations from past practice and market norm must be explained in disclosure documents and through market outreach. Standardisation is not just part of the fabric of market expectations: international policy initiatives to prevent and manage financial crises rest on the assumption that sovereign debt contracts follow a generally accepted standard. Such initiatives would make no sense in the absence of standardisation. On closer examination, however, it turns out that sovereign bond contracts are not nearly as standardised as market participants and policy makers seem to suggest. It is common to see a handful of negotiated terms embedded in a mish-mash of different generation industry models, sprinkled with bits of creative expression that no one can explain, usually attributed to some long-forgotten lawyers. At least some of the variation appears to be deliberate. But to the extent that it is inadvertent, variation can be costly. For example, it can make contracts internally inconsistent, vulnerable to opportunistic lawsuits and errors of judicial interpretation. Variation could also make debt instruments less liquid, especially during periods of market stress. In this essay, I argue that the problem of inadvertent variation would diminish substantially if sovereign debt markets were to adopt a more centralised, modular approach to contracting, whereby a subset of widely-used non-financial terms would be produced by an authoritative third party (a public, private, or public-private body) and incorporated by reference in individual transactions

Implementing a Decision-Aware System for Loan Contracting Decision Process

The paper introduces our work related to the design and implementation of a decision-aware system focused on the loan contracting decision process. A decision-aware system is a software that enables the user to make a decision in a simulated environment and logs all the actions of the decision maker while interacting with the software. By using a mining algorithm on the logs, it creates a model of the decision process and presents it to the user. The main design issue introduced in the paper is the possibility to log the mental actions of the user. The main implementation issues are: user activity logging programming and technologies used. The first section of the paper introduces the state-of-the-art research in process mining and the framework of our research; the second section argues the design of the system; the third section introduces the actual implementation and the fourth section shows a running example.Decision-Aware Systems, Decision Activity Logs, Decision Mining, Codeigniter, JSON